Man you're fast - first to buy the Armoire.

So here's what I did over the last few days:

I experimented with a lot of really cool super-detailed photos of distressed wood. The amount of coolness in them is very difficult to reproduce procedurally. Plus - you can just as easily go to cgtextures and load those yourself as I can.

However, you are pretty much stuck with that look. Staining or colorizing a photo of peeling paint to get a different color paint also stains the exposed wood. If you have a perfect mask, it can be done, but still a lot of nuance is lost. And all my attempts to derive a mask procedurally were falling short. So I abandoned (for the moment) using distressed wood photos directly, as a color map. I want a shader that can be tweaked to make the look you want, without having a photo of it first.

Then I considered using the derived mask from a distressed photo to drive a procedural paint/stain. That looked OK but it was hard to make the effect look natural and consistent with the underlying wood of the actual color map.

I then experimented with deriving an "erosion" mask directly from the wood itself. This turned out to be very effective.

I start with a photo of unfinished, natural wood. Using a threshold test, with a variable user-adjustable threshold, I compare the wood color and if it's below the threshold, I leave it unfinished. If it's above the threshold, then I apply the finish. The finish could be paint or stain. This produces a very natural and consistent erosion of the finish.

Further, where I apply the finish, I raise the surface a tiny bit.

I also made my own scratch map, which is blurry. Using bias and gain (in the shader they are called Scratch Width and Scratch Sharpness) the user can alter the appearance of the scratches. I use the scratch map to blend between unfinished and finished wood. I also added some "Gouge" to the scratch - producing a depression.

I also added a little bit of the color map into the bump map - this makes the finish less smooth and pick up some of the underlying grain.

For the fully distressed presets, I also severely decreased the shine and sharpness of reflections on the finish, and where the wood is gouged out there is no shine at all.

Combining all these effects produces a very believable, yet still highly adjustable, worn look to the wood.

Choosing some more "rustic" or "country" colors adds to the effect. Don't use rich paint colors - ordinary folk had no access to such paints in the 1800s. Even the black is not fully black.

There are so many effects possible that I didn't even bother making presets for them - there would need to be over 1000 presets to reasonably represent all that is possible with this shader.

For example, all sorts of "pickled" finishes are possible - just decrease the "PM:Color Opacity" from 1 to .25.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)